Participants:

I am all for this. It is sad when people create profiles and then lose interest. We are then struggling to carry out merges. I have seen so many duplicate trees during my research but receive no reply to requests as the person has lost interest. There are a several others, where the individual has died and it would be nice to merge those trees. I have taken a very avid interest in adding whatever information I lay my hands on regarding the India/Portuguese families. In the process, I had made contacts for collaboration with over 250 people, only to find that in April of this year a seemingly harmless message caused me to lose the access to this as well as the 16000 profiles which were added to another individual. I have tried to reconnect with people I was collaborating with but they are not active any more. We need to give easier access to people who are genuinely interested in knowing about their heritage. How we go about it is a more technical matter!

I agree. Geni hasbeen primarily designed for Managers who are active 'today' and it thereby has a basic flaw: not everyone has the time or health or motivation to keep their profiles up-to-date.

We are also all mortal and it will not occur to many of us to pass on our passwrds etc. to a relative that will take on the management of our profiles with the same interest and dedication when we pass away.

I also suspect that many of us are of a certain age where we have the time to indulge in this fascinating hobby but are also nudging our 'sell by date'. I, for example, am 77 next birthday and my brother is not far behind but only one of our close relatives has shown any real interest in keeping the family tree alive. Of course, many visit to scan the tree but few make any contributions.

So what is the Geni/My Heritage policy on this? As each of us inevitably will pass away, it seems to me that it is more likely that a future manager willing to take on each of our trees will come from within out tree rather than from within our family and so Geni need to come up with a more satisfactory way of assigning rights to others. I am sure that I am not alone when I have offered to takeover abandoned trees that contain my blood-relative and have been ignored.
I had an example recently where management rights were given to someone who hadn't requested them and as they weren't regular contributors to Geni they were at a loss as to what they should/could do with this responsibility.
It seems to me that a good start would be to notify existing managers when a tree to which they are attached has been 'abandoned' and that said managers can - if they wish - share in the management of said profiles. Not perfect but at least it will help keep the important process of merging in a fluid state.

Private User

4/16/2014 at 8:05 PM

A suggestion:

When Geni is deciding to turn all of a person's profiles over to User XX -- ASK XX if he/she is interested/willing -- and if no response within reasonable time (spell out in the message, so they will know if 'in time' or 'too late' - and what happens/happened if do not say yes by x time) or the person says No, Not interested -- offer to the next most likely according to whatever criteria Geni uses, and so on -- so the profiles are not handed off to someone with no interest rather than someone else in XX's Family Group who would have been thrilled.

Private User

4/16/2014 at 8:10 PM

A Question:
Does anyone know -- once a person clicks on "unsubscribe" (for messages from Geni) -- will Geni still send them password info if they enter their e-mail and then click that they have forgotten their password? Or does Geni fail to notify them since they said not to send them messages -- thus resulting in more Abandoned Trees??

Lois im just guessing but I'm willing to bet my mortgage that a request for a password reset will over ride a "no junk mail" setting.

Private User

4/17/2014 at 4:39 PM

Alex -- It would require specific programming to make an exception. My guess -- at least at one point, the programmer(s) just didn't think about that and they programmed it for sending NO notifications -- period. [We know notification of Gedcoms was included, because of folks periodically writing here or in Help about not receiving any - and when told to check notifications settings - reported voila, problem found and fixed]

You could always test how it works now -- I don't trust enough to try. Do you?

What's to trust? Turn off notifications, log out, request a password reminder.
If you get an email it works if you dont you can raise a Help ticket.

Also password and notifications settings are very common program issues, they are probably freshman subjects for IT college kids, everyone has the same issues, Gedcom imports on the other hand are a very niche portion of the industry.

What's to trust? Turn off notifications, log out, request a password reminder.
If you get an email the system works, if you dont get an email login again (it's not like you actually have forgotten your password) and you can raise a Help ticket.

Also password and notifications settings are very common program issues, they are probably freshman subjects for IT college kids, everyone has the same issues, Gedcom imports on the other hand are a very niche portion of the industry.